by Maggie Craig
On Wednesday, 29 March the Glasgow News reported the oddly quiet scene in Clydebank at noon, emphasizing how unusual this was:
It required only a cursory glance at the streets in the Radnor Park district today to discover that there was absolutely no change in the situation in connection with the strike of Singer’s workers. There were the usual coteries of men who had come ‘out’, with numbers of girls who had also left their employment, and the factory itself, except for a few jets of steam issuing from different points, and a few curls of smoke from one of the chimneys, gave no indication of anything like its ordinary busy aspect.
It is estimated that excepting the clerical staff and handymen generally, there are now little over a couple of hundred employees remaining at their posts.
A view of the extensive works from the height of the ‘Holy City’ gives a picture of almost absolute Desertion and Quietness.
Fewer workers meant fewer trains. Instead of seven from Glasgow, only two had pulled into Singer Railway Station and only one from the Vale of Leven. All three were ‘sparsely filled’. The next day, Thursday, 30 March, there was another demonstration on Glasgow Green. About two thousand strikers listened to an unnamed speaker and ‘thereafter assembled in military fashion, and headed by three bands, they paraded the principal streets of the city’.
Other than a handful of pickets haranguing ‘the few workers who left the factory for dinner’, things were much quieter down in Clydebank. Some of the pickets were angry, spitting out accusations of ‘blackleg’ and ‘scab’, but there was no violence, as throughout the strike. The Evening News told its readers that ‘nothing noteworthy transpired’.
The papers were reporting other news too, of course. There was trouble in the Balkans, revolutionary groups seeking independence for Macedonia. The Athens correspondent of the Manchester Guardian took ‘a grave view of the outlook’. In sport, lots of people were getting excited about the Scotland versus England football international in Liverpool on April Fool’s Day. The team travelled down by train on the morning of Friday, 31 March and special trains ran from St Enoch and Glasgow Central to take the fans down on Friday evening and Saturday morning, nine from St Enoch on Friday night alone. The Glasgow News promised its readers expert staff reporting from Goodison Park via telephone and telegraph – ‘DESCRIPTION OF PLAY, NOTES ON THE GAME . . . FEARLESS AND IMPARTIAL CRITICISM, PHOTOS OF PLAYERS’ – and the Scottish fans were buoyant:
The scenes at the stations last night were of a lively nature. One coterie of about thirty men were loaded with parcels apparently containing ‘light’ refreshments; while another group, also well loaded with packages, had six of their number as standard bearers of the Scottish flag.
Many others were well provided with melodeons and mouth organs, yielding harmonic discords. Last, but not least, were a couple of pipers, whose skirling appealed to the patriotic heart.
Bless their hearts. Look away now if you don’t want to know the score: it was a draw, 1–1. In a busy day for sport, Oxford beat Cambridge in the annual boat race.
Other Scots were embarking on rather more permanent journeys in rather larger boats. Under a headline of ‘To The West To-Day: The Rush Continues’, the Evening News reported that a record 4,000 emigrants were leaving the Clyde that Saturday to start new lives in Canada and the United States. The Anchor Line was taking over 1,100, chartering a special train to Greenock, where the California was waiting to carry them across the Atlantic to New York: ‘Seldom has such a boom in emigration been experienced as at present.’
Those emigrants were going to miss the Scottish National Exhibition due to open at Kelvingrove in May. Preparations were well in hand, and lots of season tickets had already been sold, although probably not to workers at Singer’s. The union had no funds to cover strike pay and money was getting very tight. Half of all women in Clydebank who worked outside the home did so at Singer’s. In many households all the wage earners were employed there. That was how it worked: you got a job in the factory because a relative or friend spoke for you. If no money was coming in from Singer’s, no money was coming in from anywhere.
Singer’s management had not been idle while the strikers had been marching and protesting. As the strike entered its third week, Works Superintendent Hugh MacFarlane, a Glaswegian, and F.A. Park, the American manager of the Kilbowie plant, applied the tried-and-tested strategy of divide and conquer. Questioning the right of the strike committee to speak for all the strikers, they sent letters out to every employee, enclosing a pre-printed postcard which they asked to be completed and returned as soon as possible:
I wish to resume my work, and agree to do so on the day and hour which may be arranged by you, when you assure me that at least 6,000 persons have signed this agreement.
After signing their agreement to this statement, employees were asked to fill in their names, addresses, check numbers and department numbers. Clerical and management staff at Singer’s stayed up till one o’clock in the morning to get those ten thousand letters and postcards ready to send out.
The strike committee tried to persuade people to write ‘Refer to Strike Committee’ across the postcard and return it unsigned. Not many did. As ever, it came down to economic survival. If you didn’t sign and return the postcard but 6,000 of your co-workers did, management could easily work out who those who hadn’t signed were. That would be you out of a job at Singer’s and very probably blacklisted with other employers too. Forward certainly alleged that blacklisting took place after the strike was over, calling for a boycott of Singer sewing machines in response. Singer management expressed their opinion on this via the pages of the Glasgow Herald: ‘We cannot be expected to retain people in our employ who by word and deed plainly indicate that they are unfriendly to their employers.’
Whether the Singer plebiscite was fairly conducted is a moot point. The strike committee alleged that over 1,000 postcards had gone to employees who no longer worked at Singer’s, some of whom were dead. Singer management announced that 6,015 postcards had come back agreeing on a return to work. Several people at the time, on both sides of the dispute, observed that this was a very convenient number.
Three months later, a bitter reflection on the failure of the strike was issued by the Sewing Machine Group of the IWGB:
We make our appeal not only to the Singer Workers, but to the whole working class. The lessons of the Kilbowie Strike are lessons for them too.
We are confronted by a determined and vindictive attack upon the whole principle of organisation . . . The plot aims at reducing the workers to a mass of disorganised serfs, degraded and dehumanised instruments for producing wealth for others, incapable of helping each other or of offering the smallest resistance to the never-ending and ever-increasing robbery of the master class.
The workers might have lost the battle at Singer’s but with rhetoric like that the war was still to be won. Some who had tasted the bitterness of defeat at Kilbowie moved on to other battlefields. They took a new and powerful slogan with them: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. These words were to ring out through the story of Red Clydeside.
6
No Vote, No Census
If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper, I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting form.
The suffragettes have an image problem. The popular perception is of well-off ladies with plenty of time on their hands for smashing windows, pouring acid into pillar boxes, tying themselves to railings and otherwise making mischief. That so many of them fully earned their place within the story of Red Clydeside can come as a surprise.
When asked what he had thought of the suffragettes, Mr James Wotherspoon, schoolboy witness of the start of the Singer Strike, looked a little nervously at his interviewer but stepped manfully up to the mark. He had thought them a bunch of silly middle-class women out to cause trouble.
In The Hidden History of Glasgow’s Women social historian Elspeth King suggests we may not hear much about workin
g-class suffragettes because their middle-class sisters in arms tried to protect them, believing the police would mete out rougher treatment to mere women than they would to ladies. Considering how brutally some middle-class women were treated in prison, this seems plausible. Descriptions of force-feeding of suffragettes on hunger strike make grim reading.
It’s another curiosity that the depiction of suffragettes in popular culture seems always to show them doing what they did only in London. Although the city was an important focal point, suffragettes were active all over Britain, doing whatever they could think of to achieve their goal. The campaign had been a long one.
In Scotland alone there had been women’s suffrage committees for 30 years and more in all the major cities and towns, from Lerwick to Dumfries and Inveraray to Dingwall. A large number of Scottish town councils had also declared themselves in favour of extending the franchise to women. In 1870 school boards were created in Scotland, with both men and women eligible to stand for election to them. In 1882 some Scotswomen, essentially those who were householders in their own right, were given the right to vote in local elections. From then on, women not being permitted to vote in parliamentary elections struck many people as illogical as well as unjust.
By 1901 17 per cent of people entitled to vote in local elections in Glasgow were women. They must all have been either single women, widows or divorced, as it was almost always the husband who was the householder in any couple. In his unstinting support for women to get the parliamentary vote Tom Johnston argued sarcastically that no evil results had followed from women being allowed to vote in local elections.
In 1892 the newly formed Scottish Women’s Co-operative Guild, a grouping of working-class women, sent a petition to the government calling for votes for women. There had been lots of petitions, literally millions of signatures gathered, but still the prize seemed no closer. Peaceful protests continued. One of the most colourful was held in Edinburgh in October 1909, when hundreds of suffragettes marched along Princes Street watched by thousands of interested onlookers. The female marchers were supported by a sizeable group from the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.
Again according to Elspeth King, this stalwart band had been formed by husbands, brothers and fiancés of suffragettes fed up with being seen as the poor henpecked yes-men of the women in their lives. One of their banners read ‘Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. Scots wha hae votes – men. Scots wha haena – women.’
The Edinburgh march was also a pageant, with participants portraying famous women from Scottish history: St Margaret; Mary, Queen of Scots; Jenny Geddes; the female Covenanting martyrs. The marchers’ banners included the usual simple but effective demand of ‘Votes For Women’ and the confident claim that ‘A Gude Cause Maks A Strong Arm’. The march was re-enacted a century after it happened, on 9 October 2009.
The Scottish suffragettes made a big deal of their Scottishness, as photographs and surviving banners show. It made for great publicity. What newspaper editor could resist a photograph of attractive young women in fashionable clothes well draped in tartan sashes or plaids? In 1908 Mary Phillips of Glasgow served three months in Holloway after being arrested at a demonstration in London. When she was released she was met by a group of her fellow suffragettes dressed exactly like that, Cairngorm plaid brooches and all. They were also carrying a banner with a slogan they had pinched from a long-standing advert for soap: ‘Message To Mr Asquith, Ye Mauna Tramp on the Scotch Thistle, Laddie!’
The thistle was an emblem enthusiastically adopted by the suffragettes. Not only was its deep purple eye-catching – the votes-for-women movement had already chosen that as one of their colours – its ‘wha daur meddle wi’ me’ reputation struck a powerful chord. When someone advised Mary Phillips that women who wanted the vote might be more likely to get it if they were ‘patient, gentle, womanly and flowerlike’, she told them she’d much rather be ‘a great big prickly Scots thistle’.
Helen Crawfurd, the young wife of the minister, became a committed suffragette the year after the Gude Cause March. The first person she heard address the subject was Helen Fraser of Glasgow, speaking to an audience of holidaymakers in Rothesay, where the suffragettes of the Women’s Freedom League had a summer base. Politics went doon the watter too. Listening attentively, Helen Crawfurd grew indignant at the heckling to which Helen Fraser was being subjected. With magnificent contempt, she described the hecklers as ‘undersized bantams’. What they kept yelling at the young and attractive Helen Fraser was, ‘It’s a man ye want!’ You can just hear the shilpit wee nyaffs saying it too.
In 1910, after a meeting in Rutherglen, Helen Crawfurd joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which had been founded by Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel in 1903. The WSPU advocated a militant and increasingly violent approach. Seeking to belittle and diminish these dangerous women, the Daily Mail dubbed them ‘suffragettes’ instead of the correct ‘suffragists’. The name the newspaper had come up with eventually stuck for all female supporters of votes for women.
One working-class Glasgow suffragette we do know about who was very much in favour of the militant tactics advocated by the Pankhursts was Agnes Dollan. One of eleven children, she was born Agnes Moir in Springburn. At the age of only 11, she had to leave school and go out to work. She was still a teenager when she began fighting for higher wages and better working conditions for women and soon became involved in the suffragette movement. Her marriage to Patrick Dollan, miner, member of the ILP, Forward journalist and future lord provost of Glasgow, became a lifelong personal and political partnership.
Other women were disturbed by the violence perpetrated by the militant suffragettes and by Mrs Pankhurst’s dictatorial leadership style. Helen Fraser who had been heckled at Rothesay was one of them, telling her, ‘You don’t use violence, you use reason to get the vote.’ Many left the WSPU as a result, joining the Women’s Freedom League, which was particularly strong in Scotland.
Some socialists, including many on Clydeside, were ambivalent about extending the vote to women. One argument was that men should come first: by no means did all of them have the vote in parliamentary elections. The figure stood at around 75 per cent, again essentially only householders. During the First World War many contemporary observers made the telling point that thousands of those killed or maimed had no say in the running of the country for which they were being called upon to sacrifice their lives, health and youth. It was not until 1918 that the franchise was extended to all men over 21 and all women over 30.
Ramsay MacDonald, who in 1924 was to become Britain’s first Labour prime minister, was a man said to be ‘more at ease with women than with men’. He fully supported female suffrage but was dead-set against violence being used to achieve it:
I have no objection to revolution, if it is necessary, but I have the very strongest objection to childishness masquerading as revolution, and all that one can say of these window-breaking expeditions is that they are simply silly and provocative. I wish the working women of the country who really care for the vote . . . would come to London and tell these pettifogging middle-class damsels who are going out with little hammers in their muffs that if they do not go home they will get their heads broken.
Some socialists thought women would tend to vote cautiously, favouring the political status quo and the established parties. Believing female voters less likely to put their cross against Labour Party candidates, they did not welcome the influx into the electorate of so many who might potentially increase the Liberal or Conservative share of the vote. Yet many suffragettes were themselves socialists. Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters were members of the ILP and personal friends of Labour leader Keir Hardie. He was always a supporter of votes for women. So was Tom Johnston, who gave a regular weekly column in the Forward to Glasgow’s suffragettes.
Helen Crawfurd contributed many articles to Suffrage Notes. So did Janie Allan. The daughter of Alexander Allan, owner of the shipping company
of the same name, she was a wealthy woman who was a committed socialist and member of the ILP. She was generous with her money and resources, on at least one occasion in 1911 loaning her car to fellow suffragettes campaigning during a by-election in North Ayrshire, allowing them to cover a lot more ground in this rural constituency.
Other contributors to Suffrage Notes were Frances and Margaret McPhun. These sisters with the great surname had a third sibling, Nessie, who was also a suffragette. Their father was Baillie McPhun, councillor for the East End of Glasgow, prime mover behind the creation of the People’s Palace and proud parent to his three clever and politically engaged daughters.
Helen Crawfurd did a speaking tour of Lanarkshire with Frances and Margaret McPhun, on this occasion travelling by train. She was full of admiration for how Frances managed to read the complicated railway timetables and always get the three of them to their destination without any problems.
They always got a sympathetic hearing from the miners, who admired how the suffragettes were fighting to win the vote. Helen Crawfurd thought she probably went down well because her speeches were becoming ever more socialist in tone, peppered with quotes from the Bible so familiar to her and these Lanarkshire colliers. The miners would never take the fee they could have requested for the hire of their halls. They always took up a good collection too. It was usual to do this at political meetings, the money going to the funds of the party or organization the speakers represented. As far as the miners were concerned, class clearly didn’t come into it. The suffragettes were fighting to right an injustice, and they understood all about that.
The census of 1911 gave suffragettes throughout Britain another weapon with which to challenge the government and win publicity for their cause. ‘If you’re not going to give us the vote and consider us full citizens, then you’re not going to count us’: this was the message they wanted to send. The census was taken on the night of Sunday, 2 April. Presumably all the football supporters who’d been down to Liverpool to see Scotland draw with England were home by then.